Alliance Defending Freedom anti-trans activities since 2015

The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in 1993.

According to Wikipedia, its first leader was Alan Sears, who had led president Reagan's anti-porn campaign, producing the Meese Report in 1986. Its next leader was Michael Farris (2017–2022), who had lobbied for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and has been part of the Christian homeschooling movement since the 1980s, founding the Home School Legal Defense Association. Farris opposed Trump's candidacy in 2016 but in 2020 he "worked to overturn the election results, drafting a legal complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the unsuccessful case Texas v. Pennsylvania." Kristen Waggoner has led the ADF since 2022.

The anti-gay movement had for years scaremongered about gay people somehow corrupting children, by directly recruiting them to be gay, by parenting them, or just by incidentally modeling gay relationships. In 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, with other countries making similar advances around that time, the anti-gay movement decided to transfer the moral panic and project it onto trans people.

Riki Wilchins says that, for decades, the gay rights movement adopted an assimilationism that downplayed sexuality and gender nonconformity. This created an opening for the Alliance Defending Feedom to come in and attack trans people for whatever sexuality and gender nonconformity they chose to project onto them. Wilchins:

"As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented in excruciating detail, beginning in 2015 ADF built a multi-layered 57-organization network for the sole purpose of leveraging public discomfort over gender queerness.

Its goal was transforming trans women into predatory “folk devils,” and trans kids into confused children who couldn’t know their own genders— unless they were cis of course.

But homosexuals were always ADF’s real target, and the anti-trans backlash was quickly expanded to them."

— How Gender Came Back to Gay Rights, Medium, December 19, 2024

By now, at the end of 2024, Wilchins says, "14 states have now introduced and/or passed laws making drag illegal. In the past year, there have been 141 attacks by paramilitaries against drag events, some by armed groups."

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed an anti-drag bill "even after the press produced pictures of him doing drag," because "Of course ! Drag is only pedophilia when gay people do it." Right after he signed the bill, in Nashville, someone hung a publicly visible banner with a Nazi swastika "thanking Lee for his 'tireless work to fight trannies and fags.'"

In another article, Wilchins says that, according to a major tenet of the anti-trans playbook:

"All attacks on trans kids medicine must be framed as concern for their welfare. This goes back to a panel at the Family Research Council 2017 Values Voter Summit when it was decided that the frontal assaults long used against homosexuals would backfire against children. Henceforth, all attacks on trans care had to be framed as caring about them [kids] — a phenomenon scholar Mikey Elsner has termed insidious concern."

— WashPo Editorial Board Sh*ts the Bed on Pediatric Care, Medium, December 17, 2024

The Southern Poverty Law Center described the October 13–15, 2017 Values Voter Summit:

"In her presentation, Kilgannon mapped out three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to 'divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. ...gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far [for many people to accept]. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.'

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Kilgannon’s two other non-negotiables facilitate her divisive strategy: the first is to 'never ever attack LGBT people or trans people or parents of trans children.' She goes on: 'don’t play into their victim narrative because in this culture war they are the bullies, not the victims.' The last non-negotiable, for Kilgannon, is to not approach the topic of gender identity with religious arguments, which are 'simply not effective.' Instead, she recommends using arguments 'based on biology and reason.'"